


The Least of Things

by RoryKurago



Category: Van Helsing (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Hair-pulling, I DON'T EVEN GO HERE, Oral Sex, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 19:00:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11296824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: It’s only on the truly long nights she lets him do this. There aren’t many places in the hospital where privacy can be found; the Chapel is a rarity.She can’t comprehend how many times he opened his veins to her; how many times at the beginning he stood by the pharmacy, gun in hand, and waited for the will to end it. He fed her for two years. Allowing him this is the least she can do.





	The Least of Things

**Author's Note:**

> Slight reference to 'Take A Peek'.  
> I had only seen up to S01E07 when I wrote this, but I still maintain that there was a pretty blatant characterisation swerve in ep 8 where Doc is concerned, so I reject that and all. Happy reading.

It’s only on the truly long nights she lets him do this. Most nights, she sleeps when she can; it’s never good quality but with enough of it, she can almost make up for that.

But other nights…

Other nights, memories snapping at her gut keep sleep at bay and no amount of meditation or reciting Med School mnemonics helps. On those nights, she gets up and pads out of the ward. Everyone else sleeps except John, who thinks she doesn’t notice his slitted eyes glittering in the dark. She passes by his bed silently, leaving him to wrangle his nightmares for himself.

These nights, she lays aside the burdens of The Healer.

There aren’t many places in the hospital where privacy can be found. The Chapel is a rarity. Strange, she thinks, that amid all this, a House of God should survive untouched. Ironic, more like.

Axel is always there already, seated in the front row with his rifle between his knees. She isn’t sure if he senses the nights she’ll come – if there’s some energy, some signal that passes between them she’s unaware of – or if he’s always here. Always waiting for her.

Ostensibly he splits his time between sitting vigil by the escalators, spinning on a chair in the infirmary, and pottering about out of sight on the roof. (He has long since learned that to stand by the front door waiting for danger is to invite madness. He’s seen it in too many eyes; he won’t court it for himself anymore.) But he waits here, head down, rifle between his knees.

When she enters, he sets the rifle aside and rises to meet her. As always, he’s silent: a cut-out against the red windows, all hollow eyes and hands opening to receive her. Tonight he tastes of the syrupy sweet of canned pears and the bitterness of coffee grounds; they are running down to the last of that and each pot is re-brewed, weaker and more gritty than the last.

They don’t have to be silent. With the door shut and the corridors between them and the ward, no one would hear them to be drawn in. But the quiet lies light and thick in the Chapel, less like dust than ash. An unwary word, a name, a question, would seem like making a noise loud enough for God to hear and, if he’s up there, he has demonstrated himself to be unendurably cruel. They don’t invite disaster. It comes freely enough.

Doc catches the hem of his shirt between her fingers. He takes the hint and steps back to pull it off.

Better. She flattens a hand on his chest to feel his heart beating and finds it rapid to the touch. His breathing quickens as she presses down.

This, among other things, is what keeps her coming back: this life, this proof. They are not dead. While she closes her eyes and counts, he undoes the drawstrings of her scrubs.

She can’t comprehend how many times he fed her, saved her life; how many times at the beginning he stood by the pharmacy, gun in hand, and waited for the will to end it. Her memories smear and meld. How many times did he reach for the needle instead?

She does remember, vaguely, that at the start he sat before her for three days with the gun in his lap.

He opened his veins to her for two years. This is the least she can allow him.

In the dark, he lays her back in one of the chairs and goes to his knees. These chairs are more comfortable than the ones she remembers from the chapel at school (uniforms and prayers that she's seen not one but three people choke on blood before completing). They’re less comfortable than the armchair at home. As always, she pulls that memory to the surface and wraps herself in it: white upholstery, sun-bleached and warm. The blue afghan she paid too much for on her first day in Seattle.

The chair is old, but wide and soft. It angles away from a window, the top of the maple that takes up the window motionless in the sun.

Pulling Axel close, she lets him rest his head on her chest before he goes to work. For him, this is reassurance that her heart still beats. He kept her alive; he is not alone. For her, it’s heat and heaviness to form a living wall against the creeping cold of slipping free of The World Before—the world of that armchair, the people she talked to on the phone while curled in it, the books and take-out containers on the floor beside it. With her eyes closed and his breath hot on her breast, this is a normal Sunday afternoon with the hot piece who charmed his way home from the bar with nonsense about toothpick-and-waffle architecture.

Her brow wrinkles. As always, when reality bleeds in, it brings pain like the change smashing through her veins. Axel lets her push his head down and settles on his heels with arms around her thighs.

She arches when his tongue pushes in for the first stroke. Her fingers close on the barrel of the rifle. She stiffens, looking over at it with a frown.

Axel’s fingers are gentle by her hips, easing her back into the fantasy. When her grip loosens, he resettles the rifle further away without lifting his head.

He makes little noises as he feeds. Tugging his hair draws soft, nasal ones; the scrape of her heels on his back and blunt nails on his shoulders, stronger ones. This is her favourite part, hovering between the fantasy (corded white upholstery, the folded rug soft on her cheek) and the reality (Axel warm and solid between her legs, hair sticking to her thigh and tongue insistent in her folds). The release is nice – a little breath of oblivion from the daily hell – but it’s the period of suspension where she could be anywhere, any time, that she really loves. That’s why she comes back, and back and back.

That, and Axel’s quiet sounds of need as his fingertips dig into her thigh.

One of his hands lifts. A moment later comes the metallic clicking of his zipper. He grunts into her: a soft, half-unwilling sound. She tightens her legs around him, running a thumb beneath his ear, and pulls him closer.

It seems to be what he needs: cloth rasps as his knees shift apart. Plastic clicks as his belt buckle knocks his holster.

Opening her eyes, she looks down at him just as he surges up on his knees, bent near double to keep his place. Some nights, he takes things slow, seemingly to lose himself in her the way she tries to lose herself in suspension. Other nights, the demons snap at him as much as they do at her. This is one of those.

He takes himself in hand and his movements gain new urgency; she feels it arc through her like electricity. Sparks ripple through her nerves. Light pools at the centre of her. It condenses to points at her nipples, lips, the constellation on her thigh where his fingers dig in.

He works at her like he knows the hunger she suffered and he lived through every day of it with her. Against her calves, his back is slick with sweat. The Doc swipes first at her own forehead and then between her breasts, where the tickle of a drop sliding down is maddening.

She strokes his hair now more than pulling. He’s so eager to please, this one. So eager to be close, be together, to not be alone.

He makes another sound: muffled and throaty. Not quite the guttural noise of release, but close. This is accompanied by the tip of his tongue circling her clit just the way she likes.

Threading her hands through his hair, she cups the back of his skull and scratches lightly at the scalp. There was a point, shortly after her turning, where he let it grow long; for near a month, he sat largely unmoving before the pharmacy, gaunt from slaking her need. He was, she presumed at the time, contemplating his mistake. Shortly thereafter, he snapped out of it and began returning from the roof smelling of soil, with hair shorn short again, but as she cradles his skull in her hand, she savours the familiar sweet-sour grief that she never had the chance to find out if his little sounds of pleasure could be made louder with a handhold.

Axel doesn’t begrudge her distraction. This is, after all, as much about him as her, and they both fight their monsters in these rendezvous in different ways. Tension is building in the curve of his shoulders beneath her knees. Soon, oblivion. Soon, the white nothing, and then Reality.

The light at Doc’s centre contracts. Some nights, they can stomach to draw it out. Some nights, knowing what they have to return to is worse than actually going.

They have been through so much. This is the least they can do for each other.

Curling her hand in his hair, she gives it a sharp tug and angles her hips up into his mouth.

Axel comes with a groan.

It reverberates through her in all the right ways; she feels everything in her contract and then implode. She comes apart and simply lets the pieces fly.

In a moment, she’ll have to collect them and stitch herself back together. Axel will do the same. As they do, they’ll stitch their monsters back inside themselves—never intentionally, but they always seem to sneak in through the seams, burrowing in until they’re as deep as before.

Lastly, when she lies back down in her bed, she will again take up the piece of Healer and add it to the rest.

But in a moment. In a moment, she will deal with that. _They_ will deal with that.

For now, she lets him rest his head on her belly, sweat mingling, and waits for their heartbeats to slow.


End file.
